My post about Post-Christian Europe attracted several responses. Below I took the data from the chart rank ordering by belief in God. You note that as belief in God decreases, lack of belief in God or a Spirit increases as well, but belief in Spirit increases to a greater extent than lack of any belief at all.

Here is data from the least God-believing nation in the EU, Estonia,

Q: What religion is the dearest, most cherished for you?

* Lutheran 39%
* Orthodox 28%
* Roman Catholic 10%
* Taara Religion 6%
* Estonian Indigenous Religion/Estonian Native Religion 5%
* Baptist 5%
* Buddhism 4%
* Jehovah's Witnesses 3%
* Pentecostalists 3%
* Old Believers 2%
* Hinduism 1%
* Mormonism 1%
* Islam less than 1%
* Other 4%
* None 19%

Note that 11% of Estonians are now explicit Neo-Pagans.

At Blogs for Bush Mark Noonan states:

Europeans aren't having children. Without the impetus of belief in a definitive God who rules the universe, having children just becomes an expensive nusiance. Most European countries are suffering net loss in population - save for those countries which continue to allow mass immigration from Arab nations.

This is a common opinion. Secular European societies are dying. But this avoids an interesting point. There isn't much of a correlation between European societies for birthrate and God belief. I acknowledge that within societies there is probably a positive correlation between religiosity and fecundity (aside from a few exceptions like South Korea, where greater religiosity predicts higher socioeconomic status), but as you note below there is a rather flat trendline, and that is birthrate normalized to the modal value (Ireland). Here are the values for the United States....

"Which of the following statements comes closest to your belief about God: you believe in God; you don't believe in God, but you believe in some other universal spirit or higher power; or you don't believe in either?"

God: 82%
Spirit: 9%
Neither: 8%
Unsure: 1%

Been watching Beyond Belief 2006. Funniest moment so far, V.S. Ramachandran recounts the % of people in a survey who considered themselves "above average" in intelligence. Take a guess. Answer below the fold.

98% of people surveyed (representative survey mind you!) considered themselves above average in intelligence.

Yesterday there was an interview with an author of a book about the rise of "raunch culture" among today's youth on NPR. By coincidence yesterday was also the day that Britney Spears flashed her beaver to the world. Now, you might think that Spears isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, that she couldn't anticipate that running around without underwear, wearing a skirt, and mugging for the paparazzi, would inevitably lead to some labial exposure. Oops, she did it again! Cultural weapons of mass destruction indeed. And I laughed when K-Fed asked for custody....

Update: Britney bares anus!

Update: video, audio and PDFs available

Charles Murray emailed me a notice for this today, so for those in the D.C. area:

Start: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 10:00 AM
End: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 12:00 PM
Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

For decades, the difference in the test scores of blacks and whites on the SAT, National Assessment of Educational Progress test, Armed Forces Qualification Test, and traditional IQ tests has been a vexed issue for American educational policy. Two of the leading scholars of this controversial topic, James R. Flynn of the University of Otago (New Zealand) and Charles Murray of AEI, will debate the causes of the difference, its implications, and recent trends. New studies of the subject by Professor Flynn and by Mr. Murray will be available for distribution at the session.

Registration

Panelists:
James R. Flynn, University of Otago
Charles Murray, AEI

Will Wright of The Sims and SimCity fame has been developing his new game Spore for over 6 years and the canvas he's painting on is large indeed for the game begins with the player controlling the evolution of cells within a tidal pool and it progresses up the evolutionary ladder, with intermediate stops at controlling individual creatures which have evolved from the cells, controlling early tribes of creatures, controlling the sociological aspects of creatures living in cities, controlling civilizational issues confronting the creatures, and finally leading the creatures into a space-based expansion where they meet other species that have evolved from different evolutionary niches.

Wikipedia has an extensive write-up on the entire project and notes that Wright is using procedural generation code to allow the player to define their evolutionary features via permutations rather than simply drawing the features from preexisting code.

To illustrate the the power of evolutionary branching that permeates the game consider the following:

The Cell Phase is the starting point of the game. The player guides a simple micro-organism (microbe) around in a 2D environment, eating other, weaker cells. There are at least three other types of cells, two of which can eat the player's microbe to begin with. Once the microbe has eaten several cells, it lays an egg which, when clicked, opens the creature editor which allows the player to modify the appearance, shape, and abilities of the microbe. This includes adding offensive abilities. For example, in Will Wright's 2005 demo, he added a small spike which allows the player's microbe to attack the organisms which would previously eat the player's microbe. Each time the player's microbe progresses to the next generation, it grows larger. Once the microbe grows to a certain size, the player leaves the 2D world of the microscopic and enters the creature phase.

Spore seems to be generating quite a bit of buzz and anticipation within the gaming community and I imagine that kids who are playing the game and seeing evolution play out before their eyes will come to understand the evolution vs. creationism debate with a deeper understanding of the process underlying evolution. The upshot here: the more entertaining the lesson the greater its impact.

Low IQ is a risk factor for developing schizophrenia, though the mechanism behind this association is somewhat unclear. A new study sheds a little light on this subject, and suggests the link might be genetic. The gene in questions is neuregulin 1, about which little is known. They find, first, that a regulatory SNP is associated with the development of psychotic symptoms in a particularly at-risk population (see part a above-- each bar is the percentage of subjects developing symptoms for a given genotype). They also find lower levels of activity in certain part of the brain in the patients with the TT genotype (see parts b and c above).

Further, here are the means and standard deviations of the IQ distributions of the different genotypes:

CC: 101.9 (8.4)
CT: 100.4 (9.4)
TT: 94.3 (6.9)

So this regulatory polymorphism could explain some of the natural variation in IQ.

From page 11 of a European Commission survey....

The Agitator is doing a fine job on the play-by-play following the Kathryn Johnston shooting. These are your drug war tax dollars at work. For a weak-willed waffler like myself it is nice to come across a policy area where the side of reason and justice is so obvious. Rapidly approaching single issue voter status.

By conservative estimates, there are about 110 of these types of raids per day in America. The vast majority are for drug crimes. Think this was the only one conducted after shoddy police work? Think this was the only one conducted based solely on the word of an informant? Think it's pure coincidence that in the one raid that made national attention last week, we now learn that something went severely wrong in the investigation that led to it?

Of course not. This is standard operating procedure. This the way it's done in a huge number of jurisdictions across the country. Not all. But far too many. I've had police officers tell me raids are never launched based solely on the word of an informant. But this one was. I've had police officers tell me there's always extensive corroborating investigation to verify the address, house, and suspect. But not this time. I've had police officers tell me paramilitary raids are only conducted with the suspect is extremely dangerous, and has a history of violent behavior. Not this time. I've had police officers tell me they only target big suppliers with these raids, not small-time dealers or users. Again -- that wasn't the case, here.

I find it hard to believe that the only time time these shortcuts have been used are in those raids we read about in the newspaper -- where an innocent person dies.

These assaults on people's homes are high-stakes and have an extremely thin margin for error. Couple that with the inherent shortcomings of relying on shady informants -- a critical tool in drug policing -- and you get a recipe for hundreds of innocent people wrongly terrorized, and dozens more who end up dead. By my count, Kathryn Johnston is number 41. Throw in nonviolent offenders and she's number 61 -- at least (I'm sure I haven't found all of those cases).

And all of this -- for what?

To stop people from getting high.

Free Exchange has a comment on a comment on an article about the ability of genomics-informed medicine to break the game of chance at the very core of the insurance industry. The analogy to learning not to build houses in natural disaster areas is made, but with certain diseases no prevention (post-natally) is possible.

An interesting point though re: insuring the poor. Probably you've all thought of it this way before:

But what about the poor? It is hard to see any reason why insurance companies should subsidize them. If society thinks that poor families should have insurance, then society should pay for it through the tax code, not slap regulations on insurance companies to keep information from reaching the market.

In a related note, there is a Google Techtalk available featuring Russ B. Altman, the guy heading PharmGKB, an ambitious project to link SNPs to pharmacological outcomes. As a for instance, something like 7% of people have SNPs that disable the enzyme that turns codeine into morphine, so they get no pain relief from Tylenol 3. So let's not waste the insurance money buying them that medication.

If you like watching videos of people being cool on the internet, you might also want to check out TEDTalks. In one of my favorites, Dr. Robert Fischell shoots magnet guns at peoples' heads and disrupts migraines before they start.

Are bloggers more like sharks in a feeding frenzy or vultures on deadmeat?

See the populist rally the mob:

Ah... the Perfumed Class. Our Lords and Masters, the Principle Investigator Princes wandering over their incandescent domains, bestowing upon their peasant postdocs, their servile grad students, their precious beneficence... Don't you love them?
...
In summary, I am sorry, but I have to say to you that at present and under the present circumstances, I do not feel comfortable at all to have you here as a junior faculty colleague.
Step off Logan Airport, and I'll dip you in tempura batter, fry you in peanut oil and eat you for dinner.

I love that he is able to riff off of Tonegawa's ethnicity with such dexterity.

Oh and here's one who was even more clever with Tonegawa's name. See how she replaced Tone with Toady! So CLEVER! Wish I could pat her on the head for it. "I like to think he was strong-armed into stepping down."

Let's do something besides join the dogpile.

Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize in 1987.

Susumu Tonegawa was the one who finally answered the question how the gene material in B cells could suffice to create the structures of a seemingly endless number of different antibodies. In 1976 he could in a convincing and elegant manner show how different immunoglobulin genes which were far apart in the embryonic cell in the B lymphocyte had been moved in closer contact. Under development from the germ cells (the sperm and egg cell) to an antibody producing B lymphocyte the genes forming the immunoglobulins had accordingly been redistributed. In subsequent experiment Tonegawa could clarify how different pieces of the genome were moved around, recombined and even could be "lost" to finally give rise to the DNA which is found in the mature B lymphocyte.

Since then he has been a leader in the development of transgenic technologies:

Using the phage P1-derived Cre/loxP recombination system, we have developed a method to create mice in which the deletion (knockout) of virtually any gene of interest is restricted to a subregion or a specific cell type in the brain such as the pyramidal cells of the hippocampal CA1 region. The Cre/loxP recombination–based gene deletion appears to require a certain level of Cre protein expression. The brain subregional restricted gene knockout should allow a more precise analysis of the impact of a gene mutation on animal behaviors.

These technologies have become indispensable in the study of memory. You can knockout whatever gene you want in just the portion of the brain circuitry that theory has pointed to as important. One of the first (if not the first) applications was the production of mice lacking NMDA-type glutamate receptors in the CA1 region of the hippocampus. The casual reader or layperson can basically equate NMDA receptors with synaptic plasticity, meaning the changes in neural transmission that underlie memory. These CA1-NMDAR KO mice suck at memory.

But Tonegawa also provides a refined behavioral and theoretical approach. The hippocampus has a strong flow of connectivity from area DG to CA3 to CA1. CA3 has highly recurrent connections and thus has been modeled as a pattern completion module. Knocking out CA3 NMDA receptors doesn't have an obvious effect on memory like the CA1 version. Instead, one has to dig and understand clearly the role of different hippocampal subregions to find the CA3-KOs' specific deficit.

Pattern completion, the ability to retrieve complete memories on the basis of incomplete sets of cues, is a crucial function of biological memory systems. The extensive recurrent connectivity of the CA3 area of hippocampus has led to suggestions that it might provide this function. We have tested this hypothesis by generating and analyzing a genetically engineered mouse strain in which the N-methyl-D-asparate (NMDA) receptor gene is ablated specifically in the CA3 pyramidal cells of adult mice. The mutant mice normally acquired and retrieved spatial reference memory in the Morris water maze, but they were impaired in retrieving this memory when presented with a fraction of the original cues. Similarly, hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells in mutant mice displayed normal place-related activity in a full-cue environment but showed a reduction in activity upon partial cue removal. These results provide direct evidence for CA3 NMDA receptor involvement in associative memory recall.

More recently Tonegawa and colleagues have emphasized the role of regulation of protein synthesis in memory storage, showing that certain pathways many equate with regulation at the level of mRNA synthesis (transcription) also regulate translation factors directly. This short circuits the loop. There is no need for a signal to travel from synapse to nucleus and back in order to make changes in the structure of a synapse. The same group has provided a unique theoretical insight in developing the clustered plasticity model in which changes involved in memory storage are coordinated at neighboring synapses.

The papers in the Arc-stravaganza a couple weeks ago all cited Tonegawa (and other very important PI's: Sur and Majewska) as early empirical evidence that Arc plays a role in reducing noise in synaptic plasticity rather than directly increasing the strength of "signal" synapses as many predicted.

Just some light reading in case you get tired of too much cleverness. As I mentioned at Shelley's blog, I think the peanut gallery could stand to quiet down some until they understand in technical detail the degree to which Karpova and Tonegawa were trying to achieve the same technology. I also agree with the original ad hoc report that we shouldn't be privy to those emails. Unfortunately, we are privy because of some highly unprofessional and noncollegial media wagging performed by somebody besides our latest burning patriarchy effigy.

A few days ago, I came across a very interesting article on lexical-gustatory synaesthesia (via Language Hat):

Lexical-gustatories involuntarily “taste” words when they hear them, or even try to recall them, she wrote in a study, “Words on the Tip of the Tongue,” published in the issue of Nature dated Thursday. She has found only 10 such people in Europe and the United States.

Magnetic-resonance imaging indicates that they are not faking, she said. The correct words light up the taste regions of their brains. Also, when given a surprise test a year later, they taste the same foods on hearing the words again.

(Synaesthetes are hardly ever described as “suffering from” the syndrome, because their doubled perceptions excite envy in many of us mere sensual Muggles.)

It can be unpleasant, however. One subject, Dr. Simner said, hates driving, because the road signs flood his mouth with everything from pistachio ice cream to ear wax.

Now Amnestic points me to a fascinating video of V.S. Ramachandran talking about the subject. Some reactions to the video:

1. So synaesthesia is was LSD users report!
2. Synaesthesia can be good for something - e.g. patterns jump out at you
3. Einstein might have had some type of synaesthesia
4. I can easily see how some kind of synaesthesia could give rise to new "modules" - e.g. a prime number identifier

One of the most interesting things about the Language Hat link was that quite a few synaesthetes, of various kinds, showed up to share their perceptions. I was wondering if any GNXP readers had something to share? In particular, I am interested in ways synaesthesia is good (or bad) for you.

UPDATE: This sounds like some kind of synaesthesia:

"Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much," he says. "And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops that seem to warp and curve. The shapes coalesce into the right number. I never write anything down."
 
His mathematical abilities are so extraordinary that it took a long time for them to be recognised. Daniel struggled at school (why, he wondered, were the numbers in the textbook not printed in their true colours, nine in blue, and so on?). He got a B at Maths GCSE. He wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome until three years ago, at 25. Sooner would have been better "both for me and my parents"; consciousness-raising is part of his motivation for writing his book. "My condition is invisible otherwise."

Scientists at California's Center for Brain Studies were astounded when, two years ago, they discovered his facility for discerning prime numbers. They had assumed he must have been trained to do it. But to him, it is more like an instinctive process: "Prime numbers feel smooth, like pebbles".

Wanted: Biologists who can speak 'math,' engineers fluent in genetics

Biologists, computer scientists and engineers speak different languages: Mention "vector" to a molecular biologist and a plasmid (a circular piece of bacterial DNA used in gene cloning) comes to mind. Say "vector" to an engineer, and she thinks of a mathematical concept. Similarly with "expression": To a biologist, it means protein production from a gene; to an engineer, it's an equation.

Cute, but there's discussion of more serious topics.

Lidstrom, who conducts an elective biology class for engineers, has found that biologists are motivated by the "what," while engineers are motivated by the "how." She told a room packed with MIT students and faculty that "engineering students tend to view biology as magic because they don't see us using differential equations. And often they don't even necessarily want to understand the 'what' of biology--they just want to use it.

I'm not sure that helpfully describes the situation, but there's a more interesting question. How do you teach engineers biology (esp. genetics)? The undergrad classes run out of Lewis-Sigler at Princeton seem like a good move in the opposite direction: training natural scientists in quantitative thinking.

Chris of Mixing Memory points me to Beyond Belief 2006, which is about "Science, Religion, Reason and Survival" (videos viewable online!) As Chris notes the list is heavily weighted toward scientists who don't study religion and seem to be offering their own personal opinions. Ann Dryan seems to be aging gracefully.

A few items of interest from today's British newspapers:

The lead story in the Sunday Telegraph reports that a majority of people in both England and Scotland want independence from each other. But I don't think it will happen, because it is against the vested interests of politicians and bureaucrats.

Also in the Telegraph, an article on the future of the Jewish community in Britain.

In the Sunday Times, a sensible article by Simon Jenkins on drugs policy. Of course, he is not quite right to say that the end of alcohol prohibition put Al Capone out of business: apart from the detail of whether Capone had already been busted for tax evasion, the end of Prohibition just meant that the crime organisations it had created turned to other sources of income, notably from drugs. But the principle is sound: legal prohibition of widely popular activities such as drugs, prostitution, or gambling is the raison d'etre of organised crime.

Added: The lead story in The Observer is a report that Tony Blair intends to make a sort-of-apology - expressing 'deep sorrow' - for Britain's involvement in the slave trade before abolishing it 200 years ago.

Enough with the apologies, already. Apart from the usual selectivity of such gestures - when are the French going to apologise for the Norman Conquest, I'd like to know - and the way they reinforce the tendency to victimology, the fundamental objection is to the idea of vicarious guilt for the actions of others. And I don't want that creeping Jesus Blair apologising on my behalf, let alone my distant ancestors'.

Also in the Observer, Jasper Gerard has some nice comments on the difficulty of finding 'moderate' Muslim spokespersons:

Like a famous Belgian, a moderate Muslim is devilishly elusive... Every time we anoint some cove the 'voice of moderation' he turns out quietly to favour female genital mutilation or a spot of light bombing.

Gerard also has a comment on Kate Moss's comedy turn for charity with Matt Lucas last week. But there seems to be a conflict of reports on the wording of Kate's best line. Some say it was 'I'll do anything for a bag of Quavers' (a popular snack), and others 'I'm anybody's for a bag of Quavers'. But Gerard has it as 'I'll give you a gob job for a bag of Quavers'. This has the ring of authenticity, but does anyone know the truth? Anyway, expect the sales of Quavers to rocket.

PS: in case anyone is wondering if I'll ever write anything about genes again, I have a series of posts about Sewall Wright in gestation, but these things take time.

I've been trying to come up with some clever way of framing the latest RNAi work in a mythological context, but I'm afraid it isn't lending itself all that well. You see, the family of final effector proteins for RNA-induced silencing are called Argonautes. Why did they name them Argonautes and then fall off on their Apollonisian naming scheme? Beats me, but they are really going haywire now. They named one of the argonaute proteins Caesar!

In this report from Yigit et al., they knocked out every Argonaute family member in C. elegans, the lovely translucent worm genetic model system. You'd think there would be a tie-in there. The preview about the report is titled "Knocking out the Argonautes," but alas, the only knocking out I can discover involves Circe and the Odyssey cats. The worm has a rather different system for RNAi than we do. The focus of this paper was a whole class of Argonautes that worms have that there isn't a human or even drosophila homologue for. They are called SAGOs (say-go) for Synthetic secondary-siRNA ArGOnautes.

One of the purposes of RNAi is to defend against viral infection by using chopped up viral genomes as templates for small RNAs to load into RNA chomping or sequestering machines. In worms, this system is referred to as the exo-RNAi system. In the model proposed by Yigit et al., Worms differ from many other organisms in that they carry out their defensive mission in two steps. In step one, a primary the viral dsRNA is chopped up to produce template a fewsmall RNAs from both strands. These are loaded into a Primary Argonaute-containing silencing complex. When this complex chops up its targets it also happens to trigger an production of new small RNAs based off of the sequence upstream of its target sequence in the viral RNA. These are the secondary siRNAs. In step 2, a Secondary Argonaute (SAGO) complex is loaded with these secondary siRNAs. The SAGOs don't have the ability to cleave RNAs. They can only bind them and perhaps drag them to some RNA degradation center or other.

Things I learned from this paper and the associated preview include: You can predict whether an Argonaute protein will have RNA cleavage activity based on the conservation of three amino acid residues (two aspartic acids and a hisitidine); in an uncommon twist, humans actually have less of a protein class than other organisms, 8 AGOs as opposed to 27 in worms and 10 in mustard plants (flies have 5, so we are still superior to flies), ~50 in the Argonautika; multiple RNAi (endo- and exo-) pathways feed into the second (SAGO) step in the worm such that the availability of SAGOs can be a limiting factor, and increasing or decreasing the activity of one of the competing pathways can affect the efficiency of the other; worms have an endo-RNAi pathway that is somehow distinguishable from their miRNA pathway, though I'm not sure what the distinction is just yet. My understanding was that I could call endogenously produced small interfering RNAs microRNAs. From their model, it looks like the endo-RNAi pathway is involved in transcription-level silencing (i.e. heterochromatin formation). Probably endo-siRNAs don't go through the stereotyped pri-, pre-, mature steps that miRNAs do.

Jason and the Argonauts is on in an hour on Turner Classic Movies. The only correspondence I can think of is maybe to refer to the primary Argonaute as Heracles, since he was only there for the first part of the adventure, after which he just hung out on an island cos he was all sad that the nymphs stole his boy-toy. I dunno if that's in the movie or not. Something tells me no.

Not a genetic story, but amusing (well, I thought so), this report from today's London Times:

A Muslim who killed a swan [a protected species] during Ramadan has been given a two-month prison sentence. Shamsu Miah, 52, killed the mute swan at a boating pond in Llandudno, North Wales, on September 25. When challenged by police he said: "I am a Muslim. I am fasting. I needed to eat." Llandudno magistrates were told that Miah, from the town, had white feathers stuck in his beard and blood on his shirt.

Which raises the questions: did he actually eat it raw? And was this halal?

Richard Dawkins will be on In Our Time to discuss the evolutionary origins of altruism. They are pretty good about getting the archive up in a day or so. Interesting that they illustrate the idea with Mr. a priori Kant, or am I being pretentious and misunderstanding Kant? I simply suspect that Dawkins will argue and elucidate an evolutionarily beneficial situationalism.

Drunk thugz? Apparently Asians have the market on violin playing in Europe too....

Biology and anthropology carnivals. Have a good Thanksgiving!

You know the names of some neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. Glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter and GABA is the major inhibitory one, right?. All neurotransmitters function in a similar way to communicate between two neurons. The pre-synaptic neuron sends messages in the form of neurotransmitter for the post-synaptic neuron to receive at neurotransmitter receptors.

Let's focus on the pre-synaptic side for a minute. Neurotransmitters aren't released one at a time. They are released in bulk, thousands at once. This is achieved by packaging the neurotransmitters up into a little sac in the pre-synaptic termincal called a synaptic vesicle. You can see hundreds of these in electron micrographs of synapse.

When the pre-synaptic neuron gets the cue to dump neurotransmitters, the vesicle, which has a lipid bilayer membrane just like the cell's membrane, fuses with the cell membrane through an elaborate protein winching mechanism. This releases the entire vesicle contents into the synapse at once. This process isn't entirely understood, but many of the major proteins that interact between the cell membrane and the vesicle membrane are known. So a group recently did a ton of mass spec and quantitative measurements to determine more precisely the protein content of a given synaptic vesicle and produces a model vesicle. I think it is just lovely:


They found that a surpising amount of the membrane space on a vesicle was 'dedicated' meaning that it either contained a trans-membrane protein or certain lipid molecules that are unlikely to flow around very much within the membrane. Here is one of my favorite passages:

A picture is emerging in which the membrane resembles a cobblestone pavement, with the proteins organized in patches that are surrouneded by lipid rims, rather than icebergs floating in a sea of lipids.

In the HapMap database are genotypes for over 3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 270 people-- 90 people of Western European descent, 90 people from Nigeria, 45 from Japan, and 45 from China. This is a spectacular resource for all sorts of population genetic, medical, and evolutionary studies. Yet SNPs aren't the only way people vary-- duplications and deletions of genome material are also important (as are other changes). Now, for those same 270 people who make up the HapMap, a catalogue of the duplications and deletions (or really, all variation in copy number) segregating in the populations has been generated. This is reported in the most recent issue of Nature.

Of note, they find that the actual quantity of DNA affected by these copy number variants covers a full 12% (!) of the genome. That is a huge amount of variation (we're all genetically 99% the same, right?), but is it functional? The authors note that copy number changes tend to stay away from known genes, but there are a number of examples of functional copy number changes, including ones that influence succeptibility to the HIV virus or glomulonephritis (whatever that is). I expect these sorts of variants to be very important in complex traits-- they provide the raw material for subtle changes in regulatory networks, which will then affect subtle phenotypic changes.

Another interesting story is that of the MAPT locus. This locus is marked by an inversion on one haplotype that has been under selection in Europeans. The two haplotypes at the locus are extremely diverged, which to some suggest another introgression event from Neandertals. An inversion that remains polymorphic in a population is interesting, because individuals heterozygous for the inversion are expected to have reduced fertility (recombination in the area of the inversion leads to imbalanced chromosomes). The apparent positive selection on this locus is, in that context, a bit puzzling. I'm not sure the authors realize this, but they might have solved this problem--if the duplication is the cause of the increased fitness, it would conteract the deleterious effects of the inversion. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of detail here, and it's not even clear that the duplication is on the positively selected haplotype.

Finally, there seem be some copy number variants that are have very different frequencies in the populations examined, suggesting possible differential selection. Among them is the variant known to decrease succeptibility to HIV and another known to play a role in androgen metabolism.

So the HapMap cell lines pay off once again and the human genetics community reaps the rewards; it's hard to believe that a number of people were against the construction of this resource.

Genetic Variability, Economic Behavior and the Formation of Socia